Connecticut considers special sex offender identification

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT)

Published 7:00 pm, Saturday, February 16, 2008

It's part of a growing effort by state policy-makers to help police keep better tabs on pedophiles, rapists and others who must sign up with state-run, offender registries and compel them to comply with restrictions on their whereabouts.
Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell this month proposed a new law requiring registered sex offenders to obtain a driver's license or state identification card that includes a code identifying them as a sex offender.

"It just gives the police department another tool, something else they can use," she said.

A similar law took effect in Florida on Aug. 1. In that state, IDs feature the number of each state statute that the offender violated on the bottom right corner. Florida officials hope to finish updating the cards of sexual offenders and predators by this month.

"If you didn't know about the statute, you wouldn't know what that is," said Ann Nucatola, a Florida Department of Highway Safety spokesman. Other states make the carriers' crimes more clear to an untrained eye. An Oklahoma law that took effect in November calls for driver's licenses and ID cards to display the words "sex offender" in three places. Offenders are required to renew the cards annually.

Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Delaware also have laws requiring registered sex offenders to carry identification that identifies their status, the U.S. Government and Accounting Office said. West Virginia and Kansas both require state ID cards or licenses to include the information, but don't require offenders to obtain the IDs.

In Connecticut, it's uncertain if Rell, a Republican, will succeed in pushing the bill through the Democrat-controlled legislature. Some lawmakers are already suggesting the proposal goes too far and could hamper offenders' efforts to find jobs and housing after leaving prison.

"It's so far-reaching," said Rep. William Dyson, D-New Haven, who has worked to pass legislation that helps ex-offenders reintegrate into society. "We don't put a brand on murderers, people who've killed someone."

Rell said the designation would be as innocuous as the code that identifies if a driver should wear corrective lenses.

"It's not like, you know, the scarlet letter or anything like that," she said. "If you have some identifying tool on that driver's license, how different is that than anything else that's already on there now?"

Dyson said it won't take long for the public to know what the designation means.

"I'm not about the business of defending sex offenders. But what does that do to all us eventually?" he asked. "We're going to create this colony of people that are going to be so far outside the mainstream."